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    When the Killer Man Comes: Eliminating Terrorists As a Special Operations Sniper
    When the Killer Man Comes: Eliminating Terrorists As a Special Operations Sniper
    When the Killer Man Comes: Eliminating Terrorists As a Special Operations Sniper
    Ebook298 pages4 hours

    When the Killer Man Comes: Eliminating Terrorists As a Special Operations Sniper

    By Paul Martinez, George Galdorisi and Nicholas Irving

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    The thrilling combat memoir by special operations sniper Paul Martinez, who spent seven years in Special Operations and was a sniper assigned to 3rd Ranger Battalion.

    America has one force with the single mission of direct action to capture or kill the enemy. That force is the 75th Ranger Regiment. Staff Sergeant Paul Martinez was a Ranger Sniper with the 75th Rangers during the desperate fighting in Afghanistan in 2011 when the United States made the decision to try to withdraw from Afghanistan.

    It was never going to be easy. There were still a large number of senior Taliban and al Qaeda leaders and other terrorists in secure locations throughout that country. If the United States withdrew from Afghanistan with these terrorists and their networks still intact, they could quickly take over the country and undo all the gains that we made.

    These terrorists needed to be eliminated, and there was only one force to do it—the Rangers. The mission was to capture or kill as many of these terrorists as possible. Paul Martinez was one of the deadliest snipers assigned to this unit, dubbed “Team Merrill,” after the Marauders of World War II fame. Martinez and his fellow Rangers faced near-impossible odds taking on an enemy who knew they were coming and who employed every conceivable tactic to kill these Rangers. In When the Killer Man Comes, Martinez tells the harrowing true story of how he and his team hunted America's enemies in an operation that would have repercussions that are still felt today.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateOct 16, 2018
    ISBN9781250094414
    Author

    Paul Martinez

    SSG (RET) PAUL MARTINEZ spent seven years in Special Operations and was a Sniper assigned to 3rd Ranger Battalion who fought alongside and was trained by The Reaper Nicholas Irving. He was the 2nd Place Finisher at the 2010 USASOC Sniper Competition, Deployed 6 times to Afghanistan and has faced off against Chechen Snipers, Uzbek Militants, and Taliban insurgents. Martinez was the first Ranger to be selected as a liaison instructor to Special Forces Sniper Course.

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    • 4/5
      An insider's look at the sniper's craft in the world today. Martinez shows us what is expected of our front line troops. The training. The confusion caused by seemingly random movements of men to different "theaters" to fight in. The planning that goes into an operation (when there is time). The unrelenting pace of mission after mission. The restrictions placed on the soldiers from above, and while they are understandable, how they sometimes lead them to hesitate in the heat of the moment. The way a team works together, everyone knowing their role. The camaraderie of the men who fight together. This was a very good book. I had a hard time putting it down.

    Book preview

    When the Killer Man Comes - Paul Martinez

    PREFACE

    He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

    —Samuel Johnson

    I grew up in Colorado and, like many young guys, dreamed of adventure. My earliest memories are of wanting to be an astronaut, a fighter pilot, or a sniper. And I was raised with a deep respect for the U.S. military, believing that everyone from Audie Murphy to the doctors in M*A*S*H to the men who received the Medal of Honor for their heroics in Iraq and Afghanistan was a hero and a good American.

    Right out of high school, I didn’t feel the calling to join the U.S. military. It’s probably because I didn’t see the point of being in the peacetime Army. Sure, the United States was fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, but everyone was saying that all would be over soon. Little did we know how long those conflicts would last. Instead, I worked in the tech industry and in construction, not knowing exactly what I wanted to do with my life.

    Then things changed. I had several close friends come back from Operation Iraqi Freedom with ghosts in their eyes and gravel in their voices. They didn’t make it sound like we’d be out of Iraq or Afghanistan anytime soon. Suddenly, the war sounded very real, and my reluctance to be part of a peacetime Army faded away. Now I knew we weren’t at peace, and I felt that if we didn’t stand together as friends, as brothers, and as a country, we might not make it.

    I walked into a recruiter’s office in Westminster, Colorado, in December 2005 knowing only that I wanted to join the Army and get to the fight. When I learned I could qualify for an Airborne contract I was sold, and in April 2006 I was in the Army and shipped out for Army infantry basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia. Next came individual training for my military occupational specialty (MOS) as an indirect fire infantryman. What that meant was that I was a mortar man. (One of the decisions I made when I decided to write this book was not to dazzle you with military acronyms, but to use them as I would in normal conversation and then explain what they stand for.)

    From there it was on to Army Airborne School—otherwise known as Jump School—also at Fort Benning. Things were settling in as I was finishing Jump School, and got my orders to my first unit, the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team—the Sky Soldiers—in beautiful Vicenza, Italy.

    I was still training at Fort Benning and looking forward to my overseas assignment when my best buddy from basic training, Easy Esenzimmer, dropped by my barracks and said he had to go to a Ranger Indoctrination Program briefing. In the Army, you don’t go anywhere without a buddy, so I tagged along. I have to admit, though, that it was more than just keeping a buddy company.

    I think I always knew I wanted to be a Ranger. To start with, they had the best pictures and posters, with lean, camofaced, hatchet-wielding, badass looking guys. Their guns always looked light in their hands, and their kits looked like they were part of their bodies. I had read a book about Rangers while I was in Airborne School. It told me a lot, but only so much. They were, well, inscrutable as an organization. They called themselves the nation’s direct-action raid force, but what did that mean?

    Easy and I found ourselves in a classroom with a half-dozen other soldiers waiting for something, but not sure what it was going to be. Then two tall, lean Army staff sergeants walked in. They didn’t say much; they just put on a video. Most of the video was filmed using night vision devices and was a bit hard to see, but we were pretty sure we saw men jumping out of airplanes with dirt bikes. That got our attention! When the film ended and the lights came back on, one of the staff sergeants began his well-polished briefing.

    It was short and to the point. Men, we want you to think about becoming Rangers. If you decide to try to become Rangers, you will be assessed during a mentally exhausting and physically grueling thirty-day indoctrination program. When you graduate, you will be assigned to a Ranger Battalion and deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. What are your questions?

    Well, that was pretty abrupt! Some of the others asked questions while I processed what I had just heard. Then I couldn’t help myself. I raised my hand and said, Staff Sergeant, is it worth it? I mean the dangerous training and then the intense—and seemingly endless—deployments?

    I was ready for him to give me a long explanation of why becoming a Ranger was better than what I was going to be doing in the Army, but he didn’t do that. He just said, Do you want to be the best?

    I did, and compared with all the other options, I knew if I joined the Rangers I would get to the fight faster and would go into combat with the best men I could keep up with. I was ready to test my mettle and steel myself for the intense storm I imagined combat would be. Becoming a Ranger meant hard, but it also meant fast. I knew if I made it through Ranger training, I could be in Afghanistan fast-roping out of a helicopter with a machine gun before Christmas. Not to mention the dirt bikes!

    The Ranger Indoctrination Program was demanding; it was the most challenging test I’ve ever faced. Army basic training had been demanding, and Jump School had been much tougher than that, but Ranger training pushed me to the limits. I know that many military memoirs—especially those by special operators like me—talk a lot about training. I won’t talk about that in this book. One reason is that my main goal is to tell you what it was like to be part of the U.S. military’s direct-action force in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. The other reason is that the story of Ranger training has already been told well in Dick Couch’s book Sua Sponte.

    I graduated from Ranger training, received my tan beret, and became part of the 75th Ranger Regiment, 3rd Ranger Battalion. I was on the ground in Afghanistan fighting on December 28, 2006. Over the next six years I did six rotations to Afghanistan. I saw so many of my close comrades die on what can only be called suicide missions that I can’t count—let alone name—them all here.

    I could have made being a Ranger my career, but I received a medical discharge because of degenerative disc disease. I know that sounds like an old-person’s ailment, but it happens to Rangers far too often. I had herniated a disk when I was a mortarman during my second deployment. I was young and strong, and Ranger medicine was a bit different back then. I stubbornly continued training and deploying.

    By the time we deployed with Team Merrill in 2011, I knew I was living on borrowed time. Multiple herniations led to degenerative disc disease. Said another way, my body had been given a beatdown. Six deployments in six years had left me pretty banged up, and the Army did the honorable thing and medically retired me.

    I’d been out of the Army for about two months when my friend Nicholas Irving said to me: Paul, I had some tough missions as a Ranger, but I got out before it all hit the fan in 2011. I’m writing two books about my time as a Ranger sniper. You need to write a book about what you did, especially all the amazing stuff you did with Team Merrill.

    I had served with Nick in Afghanistan in 2009. Nick was kind enough to write the Foreword for this book, and that should tell you something about how close we are. Nick has the well-earned reputation of being the deadliest Ranger sniper ever, with more than three dozen confirmed kills. (Nick wrote about his time as a Ranger sniper in two books, The Reaper and Way of the Reaper.) I know about many of these kills because I worked with him with my squad of Afghan Provisional Army. I hadn’t read Nick’s first book (the second one hadn’t been published yet), and writing a book was the furthest thing from my mind.

    But the more I thought about it, the more I decided that the Team Merrill story did need to be told, as well as the larger story of what had intrigued me as I did my research before joining the Rangers: Just what did the nation’s direct-action raid force do for our country? I wanted to tell that story today, not wait decades before some historian or journalist decided to tell it. Not that I have anything against either of those professions—they do good work, but they didn’t have the first-person experience I did.

    Nick continued to challenge me to write this book, telling me, You need to tell this story. People need to hear how leaving a war is so much harder than getting into one.

    I knew immediately what he was talking about. In 2011 it was left to the 75th Ranger Regiment to set the conditions for our drawdown in Afghanistan. That’s a politically correct way of saying we had to kill the terrorist leaders who would take over the country after we left. Otherwise, over a decade of Americans and our allies fighting and dying in Afghanistan would have been for nothing. But that mission was made all the more difficult because this was a time when Afghanistan was transitioning from military to civilian authority, and also a time when our ROE (rules of engagement) became so incredibly restrictive. You’ll learn more about these ROE

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